The 27-year-old, who wrote his undergraduate thesis on bitcoin when almost no academic research existed on the subject, became the first employee at Coinbase, now the most popular U.S.-based cryptocurrency exchange, where he first managed customer support.

“This was not your casual person working at a phone center,” he says. “A lot of the problems were really technical and there was a lot of money was on the line. … The main way we would hear about something breaking was a customer support ticket, and catching bugs at that time could make a huge financial difference.”

In his quest for more competent help, he vetted potential hires with a “Bitcoin SAT.”

Now the mastermind of this diabolically hard test has launched a hedge fund that invests in blockchain-based digital assets. Polychain Capital now has $15 million in assets under management and, in an unusual arrangement, investment from two venture capital firms — the legendary Andreessen Horowitz and Union Square Ventures.

In the latest episode of my podcast Unchained (Google Play, iTunes, Stitcher or TuneIn Radio), Carlson-Wee recounts everything from how, in bitcoin’s earliest days, he used to deposit cash into other people’s bank accounts in order to obtain the cryptocurrency to how he singlehandedly managed customer support at Coinbase until it had 250,000 users. (He had help from a fictitious customer service rep named Roger.) (Read more about Coinbase in my magazine feature on the company.)

Karri Saarinen

Olaf Carlson-Wee, founder of Polychain Capital.

And, of course, he talks about about his new venture. “Polychain manages a hedge fund that invests exclusively in digital assets. We invest exclusively in protocols, not companies, and we do this by investing in things made scarce through the blockchain,” he says.

He began to notice the trend in new digital asset investments in the winter of 2015-2016 at Coinbase, when he was learning about Ethereum, a blockchain network that has more capabilities than bitcoin’s, which is focused on payments. “People were building digital assets on top of Ethereum and launching them by selling them to people, which raises money much the way you might raise money in a series A [venture capital round], except that you’re funding a peer-to-peer open source protocol instead of a company, which is a totally unprecedented effect,” says Carlson-Wee.

He chooses the term “digital assets” over the more commonly used “cryptocurrencies” to describe these tokens because “people got it in their mind that bitcoin as a cryptocurrency was basically limited to money or currency. While that metaphor is perhaps useful to understand this, it’s ultimately not the full picture,” he says. “A good example is just a day or two ago is, I was playing blackjack against a smart contract.” (Smart contracts are pieces of software or code that execute transactions when certain conditions are met.) To describe the transactions that were being created when he would shuffle the deck or take a hit in the game — winning and losing real money — “the metaphor of money or currency doesn’t do that justice,” he says.

Understanding the potential of blockchain technology has been Carlson-Wee’s special skill from the start. Having first heard about bitcoin in 2011 through an article on the now-shuttered online drug marketplace Silk Road, Carlson-Wee recalls then reading the white paper by Satoshi Nakamoto, the unknown creator of bitcoin: “I felt like I was reading the white paper of the internet,” he says, adding that few of his computer science professors had even heard of the technology then. He then persevered to write his undergraduate thesis on bitcoin even after the price crashed from $17 per bitcoin to $2 and his professor asked him what he was going to write his thesis on “now that bitcoin is dead.” He later sent that thesis in when he emailed jobs@coinbase.com.

Tune in to this chock-full episode of Unchained (Google Play, iTunes, Stitcher or TuneIn Radio), to hear which new tokens Carlson-Wee believes are worthwhile investments, why top-notch VC firms Andreessen Horowitz and USV invested in Polychain Capital, and how the new hedge fund founder manages security for the $15 million of cryptocurrencies he now manages. (It involves a procedure similar to sending bitcoin to a piece of paper — which is not only possible but also a top method of security.)